Tuesday 22 April 2014

Noah: A Provocative Experience That Will Probably Annoy You


"I don't think it's a religious story. I think it's more of a mythical story that belongs to everyone" said co-screenwriter and director Darren Aronofsky on the eccentric, rambunctious blockbuster Noah. This disclaimer makes room for the audacious artistic license demonstrated throughout the film - from giant stone angels to Ray Winstone's heretical antagonist hitching a lift on the iconic ark like a bewildered head louse.

Biblical stories are by definition monumental, and often strangely dark. This is perhaps what drew acclaimed director Darren Aronofsky (Black Swan) to such a project.  But, when watching, it is important to try and ignore the religious backstory, impossible as this may be. Noah is a fantasy as ambitious perhaps as any societal fable, which draws its roots in the bible but only for inspiration. Its main goal, the director and cast maintain, is to entertain.



And entertain it does. Epic battles, surreal dream sequences and miraculous Terrence Malickian montages contribute to this film's soaring beauty and atmosphere.

And yet I am  ambivalent about Noah. As with previous Aronofsky work, it makes for an epic and visceral experience. It's a blockbuster in its scale and its price tag, but there's little family friendly here. From the traumatic, hellish vision of human sin - with its brute squalor and wrenching of live animals limb from limb - to the consequent portrayal of the final victims of the flood, howling as they cling to a wave-lashed mountaintop, the film is implicitly disturbing.

As we can witness in The Fountain, Aronofsky flits between profound despair and spiritual enlightenment. Among sublime damnation is sublime salvation. A particularly poignant sequence occurs during the battle for the ark, where the stone giants (or fallen angels) battle the hoards of humans who want in on the whole not drowning gig. When the stone giants are killed, a golden light, their soul, sours to heaven with a booming explosion. In one shot, we see this and the camera cuts to its journey out of space, into complete silence. This is one of the rare moments in Aronofsky's work which is truly astounding and awesome to the word's true meaning.



However, the film also has its failings. The character of Noah himself is a complete bellend. His first offence is to sing in the opening twenty minutes, reminding the unfortunate of actor Russell Crowe's stint in Les Miserables. Moreover, without wanting to give much away, the biblical patriarch struggles to interpret his divine duties, and ends up an alcoholic sociopath. Though his invention of drinking may be appalling to religious groups, it is one of the rare parts of the film which is based in biblical text. Noah did get absolutely swashbuckled, and wouldn't you if you had survived- and taken part in - the death of the majority of humanity?

The supporting female cast, however, carry Crowe's unlikeable character. Jennifer Connelly (who also stars in Aronofsky's breakout Requiem for a Dream) brings empathy and raw, ugly emotion to her performance as Noah's wife Naameh, who is in fact unnamed in the bible (no comment). Meanwhile Emma Watson - and I'm conscious of churning out the predictable 'she's really matured since Hermione' - was honestly truly striking as adopted daughter Ila.This performance grounds the film.




While I'm discussing the cast, despite all the mythical elements of the film,it was evidently considered too far-fetched to include any sort of racial diversity amongst them. I guess the question as to 'where did other ethnicities appear from?' goes as unanswered as 'how did the human race continue from one family (without a lot of incest)?' Oh, sorry Ari Handel (co-screenwriter) we're thinking on a 'mythical plane'.

To an extent, Noah questions the wrathful, tyrannical and arguably unjust God of the Old Testament. What kind of a God finds it acceptable to put the death of children in someone's hands to test their faith (the story of Abraham springs to mind)? What sort of a God Creates but does not guide its Creation, and allows suffering? Especially if you consider that the story of Cain and Abel - which is referred to as a kind of prologue to the film, and permeates it henceforth - the fratricide which the omnipresent God foresaw and did nothing to prevent. These sort of questions are raised by Ray Winston's descendant of Cain, but he is the resident bad guy of the story so we assume he is wrong. The swarming masses are evil devils, aren't they? Is it not easier for us to dehumanise the masses than to realise the colossal genocide here?

Noah seems to resonate with the contemporary concern of Climate Change. The earth turning on us due to our own sins is a transparent allegory for such present day anxieties. If you've seen 2012 (and if you haven't - don't) the boat in that is a more literal manifestation of the ark in modern day.  As an audience, we like to think of ourselves as the divine elite of Noah's family - they are the sympathetic everyman (but not because they're whitewashed, Ari).But what if we're the sinners? Noah attempts to raise this question when the eponymous character decides all of humanity would be better off dead. But 'attempts' is the key word here: where Aronofsky often triumphs in a perfect, insular story focusing on one idea, in Noah the task seems too big, too blockbuster, to be satisfying.




If you watch Noah, you can call it ridiculous, sublime, offensive, but - you cannot deny - it is provocative.

No one knows what it means! But it's provocative, it gets the people goooooing


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